Degradation half-life times of PCDDs, PCDFs and PCBs for environmental fate modeling

Abstract Literature search of the knowledge on the degradation of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in environmental compartments air, water, soil and sediment was done in purpose to find properties of POPs of interest for modeling. One degradation process, hydrolysis (chemical degradation), was omitted as negligibly slow for POPs studied. The other two, photolysis and biodegradation processes, were considered separately in purpose to develop estimation procedures. The estimates can be given as pseudo first-order rate constants k P for photolysis and k B for biodegradation. For each compartment, an overall degradation rate is k tot =k P +k B and lifetime t 1/2 = ln 2/k tot . The latter values, lifetimes in each compartment, will be used as input parameters to the Baltic Sea model.